Latest PPC Fedora release

There is also Fedora 16 Alpha for PPC64 which has been released Oct. 25th, 2011. It is available on several mirrors which are listed here.

It is known to work on the new Power7 machines and on PowerMac G5 with > 1Gb RAM. Installations on machines with less RAM might work, but that is untested yet (feedback welcome).

As we currently don't update the package repositories on the mirrors regularily, users of pre-releases of Fedora-16 for PowerPC who need to test packages that are newer than those in F16-Alpha (or later F16-Beta) have to manually add the repo containing the latest packages to their /etc/yum.repos.d directory. They need to create a new file, p.e. /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-16-prerelease.repo with these contents:

A fresh installation for F16-Beta (or F16-Final) when those are released is highly recommended so that you can verify that all reported and closed as fixed bugs have really been addressed in -Beta (or -Final).

If the installation fails, here is a HOWTO for an install that requires you to have a system with an older RHEL or Fedora installation and that doesn't use the usual anaconda installer.

On the mirrors are also install media and packages for PPC (32bit)
Those are completely untested and any bugreports without patches attached that fix the issue will most likely be deferred atm as we're concentrating on getting 64bit done.

If you want to help out with testing, please report any problems on IRC or in bugzilla (make sure to set the architecture to 'powerpc'). Feedback about installations on older hardware such as 32bit PowerMac G4 is appreciated, but as we're focusing on 64bit machines it might take some time to fix 32bit issues unless patches are attached to the bugreports.

preparing for the Fedora 16 PPC release

Fedora rebuild efforts

There are currently efforts ongoing to recompile all packages and prepare a F-16 release.

This is the current status of the package rebuild:

Rebuild problems, TODO list

- The most urgent problem at the moment is to get the latest version installable (maybe even with some workarounds for problems) so that the installer and bootloader teams can pick up the work.

- The Haskell Compiler (ghc) is available on PPC64. Jens Petersen & Jiri Skala work on bumping haskell-platform packages for PPC64. Unfortunately upstream don't support GHCi & NGC for PPC64. Therefore following packages aren't available for PPC64:

ghc-template-haskel

ghc-ForSyDe

ghc-QuickCheck

ghc-hamlet

ghc-parameterized-data

ghc-type-level

haskell-platform packages.

- yaboot only available on PPC which means we currently need some hacks for 64bit boot images

The PowerPC koji build system

All official Fedora PowerPC packages will be built by the koji build system at the
PowerPC koji hub

All non-scratch packages that haven't been deleted by the garbage-collector are available at the
package storage, scratch builds can be found for a few days at the scratch repository

Building packages on the PowerPC koji build system

Everyone with a Fedora account can do at least scratch builds of packages on the PowerPC koji build system, package maintainers who can check changes into the git repositories can build updated packages that will later on end up in the distribution.

Doing scratch builds

After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build --scratch dist-f15 yourpkg.src.rpm

These builds will be removed from koji automatically after a while.

'real' builds

'Real' builds will be pulled into the package repositories and into the install images, unless they got replaced by later versions.
After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm

ppc-koji build dist-f15 "$(fedpkg giturl)"

or

fedpkg build --target=dist-f15
(this works only when you have a symlink from ~/.koji/ppc-config to ~/.koji/config)

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